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A Bush aide's blunt words New adviser pulled no punches in his magazine pieces By Peter Baker Updated: 5:39 a.m. ET June 13, 2006 WASHINGTON - Bill Clinton is a "virtuoso deceiver" and Hillary Rodham Clinton a "true chameleon" guilty of "self-serving behavior, comparative radicalism, and dubious personal morality." Al Gore is a "mad dog" known to "foam at the mouth." John McCain is given to "showboating." And Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, Gerhard Schroeder and Kofi Annan are all "feckless fools." Says who? President Bush's new chief domestic policy adviser. While most White House aides carefully trim their public commentary,...

President Bush appointed a longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday to be his top domestic policy adviser, a post that has been vacant since February, when Claude A. Allen stepped down after being charged with stealing more than $5,000 in a phony refund scheme. Karl Zinsmeister, who has worked the past 12 years as editor in chief of the American Enterprise magazine, is slated to assume his White House post June 12. At the institute, he focused on examining cultural issues, as well as social and economic trends. His columns for the magazine included pieces praising Wal-Mart's efficiency...

The problem with most writing about cities is that people go out and say, "Here's what I like." And the corollary to that is usually, "This is what cities ought to be." Urban historians have tended to share The problem with most writing about cities is that people go out and say, "Here's what I like." And the corollary to that is usually, "This is what cities ought to be." Urban historians have tended to share ... Urban history traditionally has been about elites at the very center. It's an almost exclusive focus. How can academics be so uninterested in...

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 26, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - President Bush has chosen a new advisor on domestic policy with a history of pro-family interests, reported Focus on the Family's CitizenLink yesterday.Karl Zinsmeister is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and has been editor of American Enterprise magazine for the past 12 years.  The 47-year old husband and father has pro-family groups optimistic about his approach to life and family issues."Karl is a very bright man, an intellectual, a conservative in the very broad sense of that word," Gary Bauer, one-time domestic-policy adviser to President Reagan, told...

Your editor has just returned from another month in Iraq—my fourth extended tour in the last two and a half years. During November and December I joined numerous American combat operations, including the largest air assault since the beginning of the war, walked miles of streets and roads, entered scores of homes, listened to hundreds of Iraqis, observed voting at a dozen different polling sites, and endured my third roadside ambush. With this latest firsthand experience, here are answers to some common queries about how the war is faring.... Iraq is now creeping away from murderous authoritarianism to face the...

As 2005 closes, and the next year’s federal budget season opens, fiscal conservatives are up in arms. Though he talks a good line about battling government bloat, our current President has shown an eerie lackawanna when it comes to actually keeping a lid on the federal Pandora’s box. Quite apart from Katrina or the war on terror, there has been a pattern of troublesome spending spikes right from the beginning of the Bush Administration: Dubya’s 2001 education bill (“No Child Left Behind”) was the most expensive in history. His 2002 farm bill was the highest priced ever. His 2003 Medicare...

Nearly one third of Germans under 30 say that the U.S. government ordered the 9/11 attacks. In France, a book insisting that Americans carried out the assault themselves to increase defense budgets becomes a huge bestseller. In Britain, major newspapers carry headlines like "The USA is Now the World's Leading Rogue State." Asked which countries are the biggest threat to world peace, Europeans name the U.S as often as North Korea and Iran (each are picked by 53 percent). Countries characterized by Euros as less menacing than the U.S. include Syria, Iraq, Russia, China, Afghanistan, Libya. As one American living...

Just imagine if George Bush had predicted to us on the morning after September 11, 2001 what actually ended up happening…. Our forces will go to faraway Afghanistan and remove the Taliban within six weeks upon arrival. Democracy will follow for all Afghans…. Most of the leadership of al-Qaeda will be scattered into hiding, apprehended, or killed…. We will liberate Iraq from Saddam’s Baathist nightmare and stay on to help the long-suffering Iraqi people secure their freedom under a new democracy…. We must expose the nuclear proliferator Dr. A. Q. Khan and cease his efforts to spread nuclear weapons worldwide…....

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside. Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they...

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside. Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they...

The bandwagon is starting to fill--and thank goodness for that. Those of us who spent much of 2003 and 2004 urging Americans not to give up on Iraq can attest that those two years were stained with many harsh attacks, much niggling criticism, and abundant disdain for America's aggressive efforts to reshape the dysfunctional governments of the Middle East into more humane and peaceful forms. From the very beginning, of course, the Bush administration's left-wing enemies in the U.S. and Europe were hysterically opposed to the push for Middle Eastern democracy. A significant number of right-wing pundits also proved themselves...

Bird's EyeBy Karl Zinsmeister Take Ownership What a year! The world's first full-color feature film has just been released. Now there are whispers of special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbusters to come over the next several years. Two projects thought to be gestating: an adaptation of a much-anticipated new book called Gone With the Wind, and some kind of musical based on the Wizard of Oz children's stories. More films are also expected from the sensationally popular new comedy team that debuted last year: The Three Stooges. Meanwhile, the red-hot new entertainment medium of radio continues to boost its audience. Fully two thirds of...

Earlier this week, millions of Iraqis turned out to vote in the country’s first free election in over 50 years. They battled violence and intimidation to cast their ballots, determined to overcome terrorism and create self-government. Despite several terrorist attacks, mostly by suicide bombers, the Iraqis celebrated their freedom with fingers stained purple as proof of having cast a ballot. The incidents, fewer in number than had been feared, could not destroy the feeling of joy among the Iraqi people of being able to have a voice in the election. One man, a Sunni engineer and ex-soldier said of the...

COMBAT ZONE: TRUE TALES OF GI'S IN IRAQ #1 COVER BY: ESAD RIBIWRITER: Karl ZinsmeisterPENCILS: Dan JurgensINKS: Sandu Florea THE STORY: Combat comics are taken to a whole new level! Three months in the lives of the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq are chronicled in this groundbreaking series by long-time embedded journalist Karl Zinsmeister ("Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq") and penciler Dan Jurgens (Thor, Superman). In chapter one, "Paratroopers Over The Border," American paratroopers in northern Kuwait must contend with choking sandstorms, high-adrenaline training, and the hair-trigger tension...

This isn't just any fall season in America. Our nation is at war. Instead of raking leaves in their backyards, munching freshly picked apples, and shopping for holiday turkeys, tens of thousands of our neighbors and friends and fellow citizens are currently at risk on foreign soil. They get up every day, pull on body armor and helmets, and set off on dangerous missions whose success or failure could ultimately affect the lives of millions of people. Some of these Americans will die. And they are doing this on my behalf and yours. I'm intentionally writing about what America should...

Goodbye "Regular Joe" Democrat Democrats: the party of the little guy. Republicans: the party of the wealthy. Those images of America's two major political wings have been frozen for generations. The stereotypes were always a little off, incomplete, exaggerated. (Can you say Adlai Stevenson?) But like most stereotypes, they reflected rough truths. No more. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys"--ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans--began moving into the Republican column. And big chunks of America's rich elite--financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software millionaires, entertainers--drifted into the Democratic Party. The extent to...

Q: How has Iraq changed between your tours? A: The Iraqi economy is going to grow by 60 percent by the end of 2004. Something on the order of a million cars have been imported. Cell-phone ownership is over a million. The amount of electricity is higher than before the war. So people ask, “Why do we hear about blackouts?” Because the Iraqi economy is blooming and demanding more energy. Iraqis are buying washing machines and TVs and satellite receivers. And all of these devices are absorbing the electricity. Demand is going up faster than supply. Plus, in the Saddam...

Karl Zinsmeister is more than editor-in-chief of The American Enterprise, a national magazine of politics, business and culture that gets its name from it’s parent think tank, the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. He is a throw back to the early days of journalism, when news was the focus—rather than the newsman—when reporters worried more about the story than their image, when war correspondents understood that telling the whole story meant reporting good news as well as bad. The Syracuse, N.Y., native has reported plenty of both in a pair of pivotal books on the Iraq war and postwar Iraq: “Boots...

Goodbye "Regular Joe" Democrat Karl Zinsmeister Democrats: the party of the little guy. Republicans: the party of the wealthy. Those images of America's two major political wings have been frozen for generations. The stereotypes were always a little off, incomplete, exaggerated. (Can you say Adlai Stevenson?) But like most stereotypes, they reflected rough truths. No more. Starting in the 1960s and '70s, whole blocs of "little guys"--ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans--began moving into the Republican column. And big chunks of America's rich elite--financiers, academics, heiresses, media barons, software millionaires, entertainers--drifted into the Democratic Party. The...

THE REAL IRAQ STORY How the major media misreport today's biggest event By Karl Zinsmeister How insightful is the Iraq reporting that you've been consuming? Take a little test. If I tell you that scores of Iraqi detainees have been killed and maimed this year in Abu Ghraib prison, you may not be surprised. But you're probably guessing wrong about who hurt them. The moronic American guards who are now on trial for improperly humiliating some Iraqis caused no deaths or injuries: The many casualties in the prison were all inflicted by Iraq's guerilla terrorists. During this spring's frenzy of...